Tuesday, January 8, 2013

The new issue of Car and Driver just did a feature on the Blastolene Bros. and their outrageous retro-inspired car creations, which include a hot rod with an engine from a Patton tank (now owned by Jay Leno) and a Streamliner-type bus that you can drive from either the closed cab on the bottom or an open cab on the top, about ten feet above the road. This thing:

They're wild, impractical machines that exist simply because somebody decided they had to, or just to prove something, or out of fealty to a dream they had. They're the reason I love cars, and the writer obviously felt the need to connect what Blastolene is doing with a larger cultural project, one inspired by a deeper wellspring than just going fast and making a noise. So he went to Camille Paglia and got this quote:

"Greco-Roman nude sculpture was banned and systematically destroyed for a thousand years during the Christian Middle Ages. But it all came back with a bang at the Italian Renaissance. Similarly with cars as art: This digital generation may no longer be tinkering with cars in the backyard, but the lure of the physical and mechanical will eventually return. Cars are truly American sculpture. Like jazz, cars are our native art form."